Raven Chacon: From Noise Shows to Public Orchestra

Raven Chacon, a Diné artist born in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, has inhabited many roles in his musical life: thrash metal band member, solo noise artist, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer. I spoke with him on the phone as he and his studio prepared for a colossal undertaking: Tiguex, a day-long performance which took place across Albuquerque from dawn to dusk on 27 September 2025. Titled after the Albuquerque area’s name in Tiwa – a Tanoan language belonging to the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico – the sprawling piece is composed of 20 overlapping movements and features 19 sites all over the city. A lone trumpeter opens the piece with a prayer atop Sandia Crest at 6:58am; across town on the western edge, musicians interpret Indigenous rock carvings as a score at the Petroglyph National Monument while a trombonist plays in a hot-air balloon circling the city. The project even has its own Google Map, pinning each location; an accompanying lithographic score takes the shape of Albuquerque, its notation a mode of geographic navigation. And as with any music, Tiguex keeps and performs time: here chronological, geological and historical.

The composition originally began as DIY project; then, over two years, it was scaled up as over 200 musicians joined and the city of Albuquerque became increasingly involved. This is temporary public art on a massive scale, the entire city and its inhabitants becoming both the art and its captive audience, intentionally or incidentally. Yet no space is too small for Chacon. In December 2024, I crammed my body into Trotter&Sholer gallery in New York’s Lower East Side to hear him play with noise musician and sound artist Bob Bellerue, surrounded by an exhibition of Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s washi works. We sat and stood transfixed by a wall of sound as the pair fiddled with synthesizer knobs, loop pedals and other instruments, including a snare drum and recorder, all placed atop Hatanaka’s diaphanous washi prints-as-tablecloths. Chacon’s highly collaborative and visual ensemble practice works both intimately and on a grand scale, expanding to the parameters he has been given.

These threads of collaboration run through the story of Chacon’s musical practice in Albuquerque, and Tiguex reads like an album of his personal history and fellow musicians in the city, where he has lived since childhood. He explains how certain movements are sited where he once performed, guerilla-style, in his youth and mentions his experience playing in a mariachi band. The latter is reflected in Tiguex by the mariachi ensemble The Balladeers performing on a truck driving around The Heights, a suburb to the east of the city. Chacon’s openness to conceiving of any space as a venue is further echoed in how the piece has been transmitted: it was conducted by his childhood piano teacher, Dawn Chambers, over the airwaves of the KUNM radio station, with a livestream also available on the city’s YouTube channel.

During our phone call, my auditory background shifts, and I move from one outdoor seat to another, enveloped by city sounds that sometimes obscure our conversation completely: skateboarders zoom past on a concrete ledge, sirens blare. In Tiguex, the city plays a character in its own story. Chacon tells me the piece ‘tells the long history of the land – geological, volcanic, petroglyphic’ – on which Albuquerque sits, ‘including the arrival of the Spanish and their language.’ It also recounts the city’s role to nuclear science and research during the Atomic Age (i.e., the Trinity test in 1945 as part of the Manhattan Project), represented in the piece by a barrage of heavy metal drummers performing at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History.

Following hot on the heels of Tiguex, Chacon’s work will be shown from October in ‘An Indigenous Present’ at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), the first stop on a tour that travels to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville next year and to Seattle’s Frye Art Museum in 2027. The exhibition is distilled from a book of the same name that its curators Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter co-edited in 2023, a stunningly rich survey of work by Indigenous artists over the past 100 years. At its entrance will hang Chacon’s work American Ledger No. 1 (2018/20), an army blanket screen-printed with a visual score of the creation story of the United States up to the contemporary moment and into the future. Chacon used the blanket to fan the flames of a bonfire burning the American flag in his yard, and the scent still permeates its fibres. He subsequently developed a ten-channel sound piece from recordings of the flapping blanket, entitled Controlled Burn (2025) – which references Indigenous ways of protecting land from wildfire and restoring ecological balance – installed in a gallery at the ICA that overlooks Boston Harbor with a large American flag flying in the distance.

From his description, it is remarkably timely evoking an existential fire that licks at the US Constitution, a prescient work that has now absorbed the embers of the current political climate, both nationally and globally. On 11 October, a sonic retrospective of Chacon’s works from the past 20 years of his career was performed in and outside the gallery, including compositions for solo instruments and ensembles. As with Tiguex, repertoire spanning genres and musical traditions were represented from Chacon’s early work ‘Meet the Beatless’ (2003) – which he describes as a ‘Beatles mashup playing on a loop’ in an elevator – to ‘Round’ (2007), a piece where players gather round a turntable and ‘play’ a vinyl record with kebab skewers.

In late November, Chacon will be curating the next instalment of Deep Time in Edinburgh, a three-day festival of new music at the art space Fruitmarket. The event will also take place alongside French-Cree, Shoshone and Salish artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s posthumous exhibition ‘Wilding’. Named after Smith’s painting series I See Red (1992–2025), Chacon’s programme speaks to the combined ecological and political emergencies across the world. As with the many relationships within Tiguex, there is a connection here, too: Smith’s son, Neale Ambrose-Smith, played in a band with Chacon when he was 20 years old. It is yet another page in Chacon’s musical history, a score that continues to be written.

'An Indigenous Present' is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, until 8 March 2026

_{Main image: Raven Chacon, Music for Voice, 2003. Performed by members of the Callithumpian Consort, directed by Stephen Drury: John Andress, Lilit Hartunian, Sam Kelder and Stephen Marotto. Courtesy: Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston}